90 Quotes by J. K. Simmons

We're raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it's counter-productive.

I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.

I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'

I was studying music in college. I was singing, I was doing operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and then I was offered a job as the music director of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, in Bigfork, Montana.

When I got out of college, I moved to Seattle because it was the nearest big city and still didn't know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer, actor. I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came, and the theater doors were the ones opening the most.

Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.

I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.

Fortunately, for the first 20 years in my career, I didn't have any other responsibilities outside of myself. I didn't have a wife and kids, so I could afford to sort of barely scrape by, to do theater.

I am who I am. I have a low voice, and I look like somebody's dad or boss or a police chief, and those roles come my way.